What I hope you’ll do now, Geraldine, is read the carbon of the book all the way through and then come back to the letter.
Did you go back and read the carbon copy? Thanks. And if you didn’t, I forgive you. I never heard of a letter with an intermission before.
After Hallie said Oh, shit and started crying, that was about it. Of course in books it can just end like that (which is why I ended it like that) and in life it can’t, because the two people are stuck there in the room and, unless the boiler blows up and kills them all, they still have certain dumb unimportant things they have to say to each other, like while they’re putting on their clothes.
Just as an example:
“You know, Chip, you would really like him. I mean it, you ought to meet him sometime.”
“No way.”
“No way you could like him or no way you could meet him?”
“Right both times.”
“Yeah.”
That kind of dialogue, Geraldine. It was tons of fun, believe me. I had a wonderful time.
Then I drove her back to her dormitory, and then she insisted that I wait while she got the copy of my book so I could autograph it for her. I wanted to drive away but I also wanted to see her again.
I won’t tell you what I wrote in the book. I wrote something, and closed the book, and told her not to read it until later. She nodded.
“Well,” I said.
“Chip.”
“What?”
“Write to me.”
“Should I?”
“And this time put a return address.”
“Really? All right, sure.”
“Chip? It was the timing, I think. I mean, oh, you know what I mean.”
“Sure.”
“I mean, people like us, we’ll probably run into each other again.”
“We probably will.”
There was more but that’s enough. I went back to the motel and packed because all I wanted to do was drive away from there, though I was afraid to trust myself on the road. But I couldn’t sleep either.
I thought about getting drunk but if you were between eighteen and twenty-one all they would serve you was beer. I was a couple of days short of nineteen but my ID said I was a couple of days short of eighteen. Maybe they would have served me beer anyway. I didn’t really care because I didn’t think I could get drunk enough on beer, not the way I felt.
Do you remember the glass of corn whiskey you gave me that last night? That’s what I really wanted.
I sat around there for a while feeling numb and empty and lost and alone. I had never felt this alone before because there had always been Hallie somewhere in the distance, and now there wasn’t. It didn’t feel good.
Then I remembered my book. No Score. I had hardly looked at the copy I signed for Hallie. I left the motel and went to drugstores and bookstores looking for it. It was really weird seeing it on the stands. My name all over the place, on the spine and the cover and at the top of every even-numbered page. I wanted to buy all the copies they had, but who was I going to give them to? I bought one copy and took it back to my room and read it.
What a strange feeling. Here was this kid talking, and he was me, except he wasn’t, because when I talk to myself it’s something that happens inside of my head, and this kid was talking on a page. Well, quite a few pages, actually.
And he sounded so young. It was just impossible to believe that this punk was me. And just a year ago.
Poor Hallie. It must have been really traumatic to read all that, especially when she had no idea it was coming. I guess on all those postcards I never mentioned anything about writing a book, or that somebody was going to publish it.
I guess the book settled me the way liquor might have. I read it all the way through and then I got undressed again and went right to sleep.
I left Madison early the next morning. I drove east and almost stopped in Chicago but changed my mind at the last moment and took the Belt around the city. I burned a lot of oil but kept stopping for more so that I didn’t do any damage to the car. It still runs perfectly, by the way.
I drove all the way to Cleveland. I guess I was ready for a big city again. I put the car in a parking garage and took a hotel room and paid a week in advance. I was in no hurry to go anywhere.
It was easy to find things to do. I would go to a movie and when it ended I would go to another one. I bought paperbacks and read them. Sometimes they seemed to be sending me special messages. I would find great personal meaning in very ordinary things. But I recognized this as just a temporary mild madness and let it pass.
That’s the thing. You don’t outgrow that kind of garbage, but you learn to see it coming. Maybe growing up is largely a matter of being surprised by fewer things.
Everywhere I went I would see copies of my book. I wanted to tell people I wrote it, but who was I going to tell? I sent you a copy (which I really hope you got) and I sent a copy to the Headmaster of Upper Valley, the asshole who threw me out. I told what a fink he was in the book and I wanted him to read about it.
I couldn’t think of anyone else.
Then one day I was looking at ads for jobs, and I could find some things that I probably could do, but I didn’t want to do any of them. And I said, Wait a minute, I’m a published author.
I think that’s the first time it occurred to me to write another book. I spent a day or two trying to work out a novel but every idea I came up with was corny, and then I thought maybe I could do the same thing I did in No Score and just continue that story. I didn’t know if the material would be as good, though. It seemed to me when I read it that No Score was pretty funny, and my memories of the past year weren’t.
I guess that brings it all up to date. I bought a typewriter in a pawn shop and got some paper and started writing. At least this time I knew about keeping a carbon.
The book got written faster than I thought it would.
Well, that’s about it. Now I’ll drive to New York and let Mr. Fultz look at this. I could sell the car and fly there, I suppose, but I don’t like the idea of selling the car. Because you gave it to me.
Geraldine, I read through all of this and it feels very funny. All those changes. There are things I wonder about and can’t know, like what happened with Lucille, whether she was really pregnant, whether she had an abortion or had the baby, whether she put it up for adoption or decided to keep it. I have this persistent fantasy in which she keeps the baby as a memento of her dead lover. That would probably be the worst thing for everybody, but evidently my ego gets a boost out of it.
One thing that’s bad is that I still can’t get away from the idea that sooner or later Hallie and I are going to wind up together. I suppose I’m fooling myself but I can’t get it out of my head.
I don’t know what comes next, but you never do, do you? Just one damned thing after another. Thanks for suffering through this. It’s a pretty funny letter, but then the whole thing adds up to a pretty funny book.
I was just looking at No Score to see how I ended it, and it went like this:
I hate it when the author steps in at the end of the book and tells you what it was all about. Either you find it out for yourself or it’s not worth knowing about. So I’ll just say goodbye and thanks for reading this, and I’m sorry it wasn’t better than it was.
That makes a good ending for the book. And for the letter, too.